Day 169: Theater, by Brute Force

Many moons ago, on my first trip to New York, some good friends (that’s you, Mike and Dan!) took me to see this new show in the East Village called the Blue Man Group. The Blue Men’s blend of vaudeville and gadgetry, combined with loads of toilet paper, just knocked my socks off. I wasn’t the only one; now the Blue Man Group is several Groups, starring in Intel commercials and selling out their own theater in Vegas.

Last night – again, on Dan’s urging – I went to see Fuerzabruta, a performance in the tradition of the Blue Man Group, absent of plot and full of exhilarating spectacle.

At Fuerzabruta they hand out programs after the show, when you emerge from the bowels of the Daryl Roth Theatre, damp and covered in little shreds of paper. You stand in the middle of the space, where usually the actors would be, and the armor of the show – cardboard buildings, stairways, vast sheets of Mylar – roll in and above and about. I gawked at the actors, flying through the air and shouting incoherently in what might have been Portuguese.

Fuerzabruta and Blue Man Group seem to be the vanguard of a new brand of theater where the stars aren’t humans, but a clever selection of modern materials that have never shared a stage. Where else would one find industrial-size fog machines, strobe lights, a treadmill wide as a sidewalk, and a plastic sheet, suspended inches over your face, supporting a pool of water several inches deep and a squad of slithering, squirming, half-naked nymphs?